Funeral Games
by Greekhoop
Summary: Jake and Sherry learn that domestic bliss doesn't really suit them. Obsessed with uncovering the circumstances behind his father's death, Jake finds out more about Wesker than he ever wanted to. Meanwhile, Sherry gets a tip from a mysterious source and conducts an investigation of her own at an abandoned Siberian missile base. Jake/Sherry, Leon/Wesker. WIP.
1. Chapter 1

**Funeral Games - Chapter 1**

Nothing beat waking up in the hospital for crushing a man's budding delusions of grandeur. Jake learned that the hard way in Minsk, six months after the first time he saved the world.

It happened after they'd finished clearing out the last nest of Plagas in one of the crumbling apartment blocks below the river. The technology behind the Plagas was so out of date at this point that it was practically retro, a little bit like bringing an eight track player to a gun fight. Even the locals who had hired them had seemed apologetic about it.

The whole thing was a pretty pathetic skirmish, not even worth getting all dressed up for. Jake cut the locals a decent discount for his services, and he set most of the cash aside for getting good and drunk.

He remembered feeling competent, cocky, immortal. Other people could die, he figured, and indeed they might do so all the time, but not him. Nothing could even touch him.

That was what he thought right up until the moment that his motorcycle skidded on a patch of ice, and he went over the handlebars. And then nothing until he woke up in the hospital with a crude horseshoe shape shaved out of his hair and a row of stitches running from his eyebrow to his crown.

He was fine, more or less. It was just a concussion. But there was nothing like taking out a dozen Plaga bare-knuckled only to wipe out on a patch of ice no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper to make you realize what a crapshoot life and death was. Laid up in a Belorussian clinic, the left side of his head throbbing like it was going to push his eye right out of his skull, Jake began to wonder how it could be that his father alone had managed to miss that simple, inescapable fact.

Since he'd found out the truth, Jake had caught himself thinking about his old man more and more. It had been like that when he was younger, when he had first realized that there was something in his mother's past, something she never talked about, something that had trickled down into him. When they were on good terms, which they usually were, Jake assumed that his father had skipped out on them, or, at best, that he was dead. When they fought, his internal narrative revised itself and it was his mother who had callously driven a good and decent man away.

She never knew that he had thought this; at least, he hoped she hadn't. Jake never asked her anything, not even a name. Because he had learned how to walk before he could crawl, and how to throw a punch before he could read, and how to take a fucking hint before he could even talk.

It wasn't until she was dead and gone that he had finally realized he even had the words to say that he hated his father. Running with mercenaries was kind of like being at ground zero for daddy issues, and the first time he heard one of the older guys running his mouth about what a sack of shit his own father had been, Jake had actually laughed. That small pitiful sound, rusty from years of disuse, was like a revelation. It was all it took for the little Dutch boy to pop his finger out of the dam and release a whole torrent of black pent-up hate.

Hate was good, it was progress. But hate had appetites. For five years, Jake had soothed himself with sex, alcohol, food, drugs. Any vice or poison he came across, down the pipe it went.

Things had been going pretty well, at least in the sense that they could have been going much worse. And then Albert Wesker had to go and ruin it.

The name hadn't meant anything to Jake the first time he'd heard it. Most of Wesker's movements and dealings, he found out later, were classified during his life. The name was just a collection of syllables, then, sounds drifting in a void, occasionally knocking into one another with dull clunks. It was the fact that his father had a name at all, an identity outside of his utter lack of identity, that had pulled Jake up short.

He felt that he had been adrift for years on a vast and featureless sea, and when that name had appeared it had been like a barren rock rising out of the waves. Dry land at last for him to throw himself upon.

Jake had never intended to find out more than just that name. The things Carla had hinted at, the little scraps of information that she had dangled before him, he didn't want to hear anything else like that. He didn't want to know if knowing was just going to be embarrassing for him, or difficult. But after five years of indulging every whim that popped into his head, one thing that Jake didn't have in abundance was self-control.

At first, he'd been satisfied with just pictures. There weren't a lot of photographs of his father still floating around unclassified, but he did come across a few. One very old one from when Wesker had first joined Umbrella as a researcher showed a thin, awkward teenager with sunglasses perched on top of his head, younger then than Jake was now, somewhat ferret-faced as if he was still growing into his features.

Wesker had been facing the camera but not looking into it. His eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere beyond.

Jake was annoyed at the implication that he had anything in common, even on the cellular level, with this twerpy little nerd, this poindexter who looked like he jerked off to Pokemon or something in his spare time. His hands would have been soft, Jake remembered thinking with a shudder that was half of revulsion and half of anger, because he had never had to put them to any kind of serious work. He'd just coasted along: nursery to prep school to science camp to a cushy job at daddy's company.

What an asshole. He probably thought he'd actually earned it.

It would have been better, Jake knew now, if he had just left the whole thing alone. If he had come away with that image of his father affixed firmly in his mind: a young man, wide-eyed, still blinking, as if he had been suddenly and roughly dragged out of the cellar where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life, into the full and unmerciful light of day.

By his third day in the hospital, Jake could tell they were thinking about unceremoniously throwing him out. The gash on his head had pretty well healed up, and lights no longer hovered on the fringes of his sight. He could eat the _kashka_ they brought him at mealtimes and actually keep it down. Still, Jake wasn't in any hurry to leave, and as long as they didn't need the bed for some other poor basketcase, he wasn't going to rush things along if he could help it.

It was nice, he thought, being laid up like this. He had a roommate, but the guy was in for a broken jaw and couldn't have said a word if he had wanted to. When Jake heard him get up and shuffle out from behind the threadbare curtain that split their room in two, he turned on his side and closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep until he had gotten back from taking a piss or stocking up on painkillers or whatever. Jake had never actually laid eyes on him, and that was the way he preferred it.

There was nothing else to do but lay there and think. He thought about a few different things, but mostly about his father, and how he had definitely never been stuck in a hospital with a crumbling Soviet exterior and bright, clean, brand new interior. How he'd never had a wedge shaved impersonally out of his immaculate hair, and a row of neat, black stitches like a row of marching ants put in its place.

He used to dwell on the idea that Wesker had gotten all the luck. Now he was beginning to think that maybe he had gotten none of it.

Jake couldn't decide if that little revelation was genuine progress or just sour grapes. Or maybe it was just a bit of rhetorical nonsense born out of feeling cooped up and bored with no one to talk to. All at once, with no real build up at all, he realized he missed Sherry awfully.

It had been half a year since he had last seen her, and almost that long since he had really given the time they'd spent together much thought. It had only been a few days cumulatively, and with everything that had been going on it wasn't as if they'd had much time to get to know each other. Still, Jake felt that she understood him on an intimate level, the same way he might flip on the radio and hear a song and feel that the singer knew him perfectly, without ever even knowing his name.

Jake liked to imagine that she was on vacation somewhere warm. Somewhere with a beach, maybe on the Mediterranean, where the girls sunbathed topless. Not that Sherry would do anything like that, but she might think about it. She only wore one-piece bathing suits, Jake decided. Modest, but not too covered up. She always wore sunscreen, putting it on every six hours like clockwork. She spread out a big towel on the sand and read a book by the ocean, totally absorbed in the story, her expression shifting unconsciously with each plot twist.

Jake got so wrapped up thinking about it that when Sherry actually did show up at his bedside on the gray and dismal morning of his fourth day in the hospital, Jake was momentarily baffled as to how she managed to be in two places at once.

"Long time no see," Sherry said. She smiled shyly, as if to apologize for intruding.

Jake was still trying to get his shit together. He sat up in bed, running his palms over his clothes in a vain attempt to smooth out the wrinkles. The dingy hospital sheets made him feel self-conscious so he pushed them off. Then, feeling exposed, he pulled them back.

"Is something wrong?" It wasn't what he had wanted to say, but it was what came out.

Sherry's mouth contracted into a frown. She looked great, Jake decided, but a little pale. There hadn't been any Mediterranean beach in her recent past. If the shadows under her eyes were any indication, she'd been soaking up the glow from a computer monitor instead of the sun.

"What do you mean?" she said quietly.

"Don't get me wrong," Jake said. "It's nice to see you and everything. But the last time you showed up out of nowhere it was because the world was going to hell."

"No, it's nothing like that." She was blushing, but so far she seemed unaware of that fact. "One of our agents filed a report about what happened to you. I came to see if you need anything?"

Jake dipped his head, trying to catch her eye, but she seemed pretty intent on avoiding his gaze. It was a little unsettling. "In a professional capacity?" he said.

'Not completely." Sherry's blush deepened, and all at once she seemed to realize it was there. Her hand flew up to the bridge of her nose, scrubbing at the pink skin.

"Fine," Jake said. "So it's not _Return of the Living Dead_. That's good. But something sure has you all worked up."

All at once, she dropped her hand back to her side. Then she lifted her eyes and looked right at him. The blush was still there, but she didn't look timid anymore. "I'm not ready to talk about that yet," she said firmly. "Not here."

"You have somewhere else in mind?"

"Back home," Sherry said. She unclasped her black pocketbook and took out a neat envelope. "I have your plane ticket here. The visa is taken care of, too. I had to pull a few strings, but it helps if you know the right people."


	2. Chapter 2

**Funeral Games – Chapter 2**

When Jake got back from the gym, after he had showered and changed and tossed his sweat-soaked workout clothes into his bag for tomorrow, he started dinner. He did it mechanically, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen without checking the time, without even thinking that it was getting late.

His life had become routine.

He wouldn't say it was automatic. No, it wasn't exactly that. It was more like practicing a one-two punch on the heavy bag for so long that the next time some big lout lunged at you, you dropped him just like that, without even knowing that you were going to do it until it was done.

But even that was not a perfect comparison, Jake thought as he stood in front of the open refrigerator, scrutinizing its contents. He already knew what was there. Years spent living hand to mouth had made him meticulous and fussy about food. Even without looking he knew exactly what they had, right down to the last cold cut and fuzzed-over plastic container of leftovers.

All the same, this wasn't a matter of life or death, not like war, or like knocking some big lout flat on his ass. It was just dinner, which Jake tried to have ready right at 7:31. That was when Sherry would walk through the door, unless she had missed her train again, and she'd be hungry, because she had probably worked through lunch again.

Jake didn't go around trying to pass himself off as enlightened or anything because he stayed home while Sherry worked. After the thing in China, she'd been transferred to a desk job, and the paycheck she brought home was plenty to support both of them. Jake, who had never been much good at anything but cracking heads, didn't really see the point in going out and trying to make nice in the post-employment economy when he didn't have to.

He stayed home. Cleaned, cooked, ran errands, hit the gym five days a week. A lot of times when he was out during the day, he'd see some young guy in a suit, a guy about his age, with a phone glued to his ear and a surge in his stride and a shrewd and starving look on his face.

Thank god that's not me, Jake always told himself, as a black barb of jealousy lodged itself a little deeper in his heart.

He took some hamburger that had been thawing out of the fridge, then added a red onion, a couple of potatoes, and some mushrooms that looked like they were about to go bad to his little pile of supplies on the counter. Jake's mother had taught him how to make pirogues when he still a kid. They'd never really gotten enough to eat back in those days, but when you chopped everything up and mixed it with enough cheap starch, sometimes you actually felt full for a few minutes afterwards.

Anyway, Sherry seemed to like them pretty well.

Jake got out a knife and started to mince the onion in neat, unhurried strokes. He had checked out again, and he was moving without even being conscious of what he was doing. His hand did not need to be told to bring the knife down, to scrape the chopped onions off the cutting board and into a mixing bowl when he was finished.

It wasn't that he was distracted, or deep in thought. In fact he wasn't really thinking about anything at all. Occasionally, a few lines of an old conversation, a few bars or a song he had heard once, would pass through his mind. That was all, though.

He finished cutting up the vegetables and turned around to rinse the knife in the sink. All at once, an image of his father's face came untethered from some place in the depths of his subconscious and floated up to flash briefly before his eyes.

Jake stopped what he was doing. He looked down at his hands. One was on the hilt of the knife, and the other held a dishtowel which he was using to dry the blade. For a single horrible instant, he had no idea where he was, or why, or even how he had gotten here.

Carefully, he set the knife down on the counter, then he planted both palms in the edge of the sink. His eyes drifted out of focus, staring off into the middle distance. This time, though, his mind wasn't wandering. The gears were turning up there, all to some definite purpose.

He tried to picture his father's face. What came to mind was not the self-assured and imposing figure that Wesker had cut in the years leading up to his death, but instead only the twitchy and perpetually startled-looking kid he had been at seventeen. If he walked through the door right now, Jake thought, they would have nothing to say to each other. He would have no way to explain to that man he had always hated why he was cooped up in some mid-market condo outside Washington DC, making dinner, picking up the dry cleaning, going to the supermarket, being utterly unremarkable in every way.

When he did hear the front door open, Jake jumped about a mile. For a second, he really was convinced that somehow his father had clawed his way out of hell just so he could let Jake know how disappointed he was in person. Any moment now he would start down the hall, his Calvin Klein suit matted with the dirt of the grave, dragging his spectral chains behind him…

"Hello?" Sherry called from the foyer. Her voice dragged him roughly back to reality.

Sheepishly, Jake looked around the kitchen, remembering the half-made pirogues sitting forgotten on the counter. He sucked in a deep breath. "In here, babe," he called back. He had wanted it to sound careless, casual, like there was nothing to see here. He didn't think he had pulled it off.

Sherry came down the hall and poked her head into the kitchen. "Something smells good," she said, and smiled. Jake hadn't started cooking yet so there wasn't anything, good or bad, for her to have smelled. Still, she said it every night and there was no reason for her to stop now.

"Give me a half hour," Jake said. "I got tied up at the gym. You're not starving are you?"

Sherry shook her head. "I'm okay."

She padded across the kitchen floor in her stocking feet. They'd made it through the fall together, and the winter, and now it was spring, which meant that the roads were grimy with melting snow. Sherry had a very strict policy about tracking mud into the house, and she always left her shoes by the door. Jake liked seeing her off in the morning, liked when she crouched down to zip up her high heeled boots, when she straightened up again, and with the four-inch boost to her height they could suddenly look each other in the eye.

Without those boots, though, Jake had to bend down so that she could kiss him. She did it quickly, brushing her lips over the corner of his mouth, and then she smiled, though her eyes were tense.

"You're too wonderful," she said. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

Sherry looked at him for a second, like she was waiting for something, then she turned on her heels and went silently out.

It was only then that Jake realized he probably should have said something just then. Something nice, to make her feel good. He looked down at the half-made meal spread out on the counter, the dough webbing his fingers, the flour dusting the front of his shirt. It would have to do in a pinch, he decided. He'd always been good at doing things that needed to get done, and bad at saying things that needed to get said.

He heard the shower come on in the bathroom, a dull rattle reverberating through the thin walls of the condo.

Sherry still didn't know how much he had loathed the idea of moving in with her when she had first brought it up, how much the suggestion had almost sent him running right back to the warm embrace of being a gun for hire. He'd still been mulling over how to tell her when she had showed up in the living room where he was bunking up on the sofa one night and crawled in under the blankets with him.

They'd fooled around for a while without really making much headway. It wasn't that Jake didn't know his way around a warm body, and, just like with all their dealings together, Sherry didn't have any trouble keeping pace with him. But trying to hook up with someone you actually liked, Jake soon discovered, was like trying to unlearn years of bad technique.

Eventually, he tried to turn over on top of her and only managed to roll them right off the couch.

Laying there in the blue light of the muted television, half covered by the blankets they had dragged after them, with one of Sherry's sharp little hipbones digging into his stomach, Jake started to laugh. Sherry didn't ask him why. She didn't want to know what was so funny. She just looked at him perplexed for a moment, and then she laughed a little too.

Squirming out from under him, she offered her hand. They went back to her bedroom together, and Jake spooned up against her back and fell right asleep, to hell with the boner awkwardly tenting the front of his underwear.

It wasn't until he woke up the next morning that he realized he had all but agreed to stay. He could have kicked himself for that one. It wasn't that he didn't like Sherry; he just wasn't quite sure he liked her more than he liked his freedom.

He shouldn't have worried. Jake didn't know what he had expected exactly, but in truth he hardly saw Sherry at all these days. A few hours in the evening when she was too exhausted from a day at the office to really carry on a conversation; one day on the weekends when they slept late together and then shuffled around the house cleaning the windows and vacuuming.

For the most part, Jake was alone. He was used to it. Being alone had always suited him just fine. But it seemed kind of a waste now, kind of sad in a way he wasn't sure he'd be able to articulate.

When he'd finished rolling out the dough for pirogues, Jake wrapped it up into a cylinder. He cut a slice from one end, flattened it out into a little pancake in the palm of his hand, and spooned some of the meat into the middle. Then he folded one end over and pleated the edges of the dough, making little folds and then tucking them under, sealing up the edge of the dumpling.

The whole process had only taken a few seconds. When Sherry had seen him do it for the first time, she had called him an artist. Jake supposed that there was something aesthetically pleasing about creating that perfect seam, but it wasn't like he was doing it to impress anybody. Hell, the damn things just fell all to pieces unless you got them exactly right the first time.

As he started in on the second pirogue, Jake realized that he hadn't thought about his father once in almost ten whole minutes. He was about to break out the tickertape parade for that little achievement, when all at once that old familiar face was dredged to the surface again.

That faded photo, that file degraded from years of being copied and recopied, had become his father's death mask. In it, Wesker's eyes had been hungry. He'd wanted something back then. Whatever else he had done, who could blame him for that? Who could get mad at someone just for wanting?

After a while, Sherry came out of the bathroom. Her hair was damp from the shower and she was dressed in a little pair of cotton shorts and a tank top. Jake wondered if he'd put them on for him. She sure looked like a million bucks.

"How was work?" Jake said as he started to cut up some stuff to make a salad.

"Same as always," Sherry said. "We're drafting a proposal for submission to the DOD. Once it goes through, we'll have access to the old Umbrella Corporation spy satellites."

That name – Umbrella – was like a sudden weight dropped into the pit of his stomach. Jake felt the little hairs on the back of his neck rise, but he managed to keep his voice pretty casual. "You sure that's such a good idea?"

"Someone might as well get some use out of them," Sherry said. "They're just sitting up there rusting. Do things rust in space?"

"I don't know," Jake said.

"I'll look it up." Sherry slid her phone out of the waistband of those little shorts. While she pulled up Google and typed with one hand, she got a couple of beers out of the fridge with the other.

"It says that metal can't rust without oxygen, but exposure to ultraviolet light can trigger a similar process."

"Cool," Jake said.

"Yeah." She nudged the cold side of one of the beer bottles against his wrist, and Jake took it and had a long swallow. When he went back to folding the last of the pirogues, Sherry leaned against the counter watching him.

"You have beautiful hands," she said quietly.

"And you've got great tits, but I'm not allowed to stare at those."

Sherry kicked him in the ankle for that one. She was just playing around, but it was still hard enough to hurt a little.

"Does it really bother you that we're going to use those satellites?" Sherry asked.

"It bothers me that they're up there at all more than it bothers me that you're going to have access to them," Jake said. He finished up the last pirogue placed it on the steamer. "It all seems kind of… you know."

"You make it sound like I'm doing something wrong."

"It's not that. I just think that, if it were me, I'd want to leave those old dead things alone."

"Now you sound superstitious." Sherry took a drink of beer, but not so quickly that she could hide an amused grin.

"I guess I do. It doesn't really matter how I sound, though. You'll do just what you want."

Sherry slowly lowered the beer bottle. She wasn't smiling anymore. Jake knew that he had said the wrong thing, that what he had meant to say had come out in the worst possible way.

"Because you know what's best," he amended quickly. "Now, grab a couple of plates. These are just about ready to eat."

* * *

After dinner, Jake left the dishes for the morning and they curled up on the couch and got a movie from Netflix. Sherry stretched out with her legs in Jake's lap, which was just fine by him.

About twenty minutes in, when it became pretty clear that the movie wasn't going anywhere interesting, Jake slipped a hand under the blanket and began to stroke her calf.

She sighed and arched back against him. Encouraged, he went on, cupping his hand around one of her knees. Her skin was soft; every time he touched her he was surprised by how soft she really was. Though she was small, she wasn't slight. That always surprised him too, that she was a creature of real weight and substance. He had gotten used to translucent girls, there with him in form but already halfway out the door.

Jake moved his hand up over the bulge of her thigh. He was trying to go slow, as slow as he could, dragging it out to tease her a little. Sherry didn't seem to be taking the bait, though. When Jake glanced towards her face, he found it turned away from him, facing the television. In the glow from the screen, the tips of her blonde hair looked blue.

When his hand reached the taut little tendon on the inside of her thigh, he expected her to flinch. It wasn't, Jake was all but positive, that she didn't like it when he touched her. But she still tensed up in a kind of shivery, nervous anticipation when things started to get hot and heavy. At first, Jake had thought it was because he was doing something wrong. But Sherry had never mentioned anything, and she didn't seem like the type to keep quiet to preserve a guy's feelings. Besides, Jake wasn't about to sprinkle a hundred rose petals all over the bed or anything like that, but he knew that he had a pretty good system where it counted.

Tonight, however, that nervous little twitch, that winding up of muscle under his hand never came. Maybe, he thought, Sherry was finally getting over her honeymoon jitters. He stretched out two fingers, sliding them under the hem of her shorts until he felt a fringe of downy curls.

Sherry murmured softly and slowly raised her head, propping herself up on her elbow.

Jake frowned. "You fell asleep."

"I was just resting my eyes."

When Jake withdrew his fingers, Sherry sat up slowly to follow them. She swung one leg over his thighs so that she was kneeling across his lap. Her hair was tousled, eyes still half-closed. Her lips twitched into a sleepy smile.

"What were you doing with your hand there?" she said.

"Looking for my keys."

Sherry kissed him. Her lips moved slowly, still numb with sleep. "Did you find them?"

"No." Jake stroked his hands along her sides, lifting her shirt. Then he felt it again, that subtle tensing of muscle, as if she were trying to pull away from him without actually moving.

"Take another look," she said. "I'm positive they're there."

Jake sighed. "It's okay, babe. I guess you had a long day. You should go to bed."

"Are you sure?" Sherry said.

"Yeah, I'm sure. We'll have all Saturday to fool around. And you can have all Sunday to walk around bowlegged like a cowboy."

Sherry rolled her eyes as she climbed off his lap. "You always say the most romantic things, Jake."

He watched her head back towards the bedroom. At the door, she glanced back at him. "Not coming?"

"I'm just going to finish the movie and then I'll be along." He glanced back at the screen. Things had changed, but he couldn't say what. "We should get Hulu Plus or something."

"Maybe when I get that promotion," Sherry said, turning away again. "We'll be able to afford it then."


	3. Chapter 3

**Funeral Games - Chapter 3**

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay between chapters this time around. I got run over by the work steamroller. Ideally, though, I'd like to try to put a new installment up every week. Thanks for reading, everybody.

The cast is starting to find their marks now. Bonus points for guessing who the man and woman at the end are. ; D

* * *

Jake slept late the next day, and he wasn't up in time to see Sherry off to work. Her last words to him the night before kept running through his head. He couldn't remember what he had asked for, but he remembered very clearly that she had told him they couldn't afford it. Jake had heard that plenty of times, back in Edonia when he was growing up. Back then, it was just as likely that it would come after he'd asked for new shoes or schoolbooks, so hearing Sherry apply it to something inessential, something he'd only wanted for an instant, was almost a relief.

He knew that he and Sherry lived pretty comfortably, though he never had the pocket money to really go paint the town like he'd always come to expect after a successful mission. Still, he'd never had any reason to think that they might be short of money.

Sherry would have told him. She wouldn't have kept something like that to herself. Still, her words wouldn't leave him alone.

He heard them while he watched his morning coffee drip down into the pot, while he sliced an apple and poured himself a bowl of cereal. While he took everything and sat down with it at the clean bright kitchen table. Then while he dipped his spoon into the bowl and let it fall against the edge, all but forgotten.

His thoughts drifted, following the echo of Sherry's voice into the locked-away corners of his mind where he kept all those memories of his mother. At first she had forced herself not to cry in front of him when she told him that they had no money, then it seemed that she had lost the strength to hide her tears at all. Then, finally, near the end, she had stopped crying entirely, as if that great reservoir of misery inside of her had finally run dry.

It had always come back to money, Jake thought. And how some people had more than they could ever spend, but he had never been one of them.

The pounding of his own heart brought him back to his senses. Jake's throat felt tight, and when he pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, he could feel that his pulse was racing. He had frightened himself, he realized, and he was embarrassed.

He looked down at the breakfast he had not touched. The coffee was cold, the apple brown, the cereal dissolved into amorphous sludge in the milk. God knew how long he had been sitting there like that, brooding over things he couldn't change or help.

His appetite suddenly gone, Jake got up and scraped the remains of the cereal into the garbage disposal. Then he threw out the apple and tossed the coffee into the sink. In the living room, he found Sherry's laptop resting again the side of the couch, and he turned it on.

There was no password. She had never tried to keep her computer private, but they had a kind of unspoken rule that he wasn't supposed to use it. But it wasn't as if he was going to snoop through her emails or anything, Jake reasoned. He just wanted to get a better look at the bank account that was half his anyway.

When he opened up the spreadsheet software, he found the monthly budget right at the top of the recent documents. He expected to open it up and be confronted by columns of impenetrable numbers, but it was actually pretty easy to follow. Sherry was meticulously organized, and she kept painstaking records.

They had more expenses than he had thought. Some of them he knew about while others – the credit card payments, Sherry's student loans – were like relics from a time before they had met.

At the bottom of the sheet, he found what he was looking for. The month before they had been 176 dollars over budget. It was a tiny discrepancy, and one that had been easy to cover by putting a little less into savings, but Jake would have been lying if he said he didn't feel a little shiver of anxiety at the sight of those red numbers.

He went back through the past few months. They were all the same. Each month they were a little in the red. Never more than a couple hundred dollars; never more than they could afford with a little creative juggling of funds. Regardless, Jake thought, the writing was on the wall. He was a burden on Sherry's finances. It was taking care of his unemployed ass that put her in debt each month.

Slowly, he closed the laptop and put it away. Then he got up and wandered into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and looked at its contents, mentally cataloguing everything, reassuring himself that there really was enough to eat, that there always would be, that his lean and hungry days were behind him.

The compressor clicked on, reminding him of how much energy he was burning standing here like this, how much it was going to add to the bill at the end of the month. Guiltily, he closed the door.

He had to pull it together, he told himself. Thinking about the past, remembering all those things that should have stayed buried, wasn't going to get him anywhere. He tried to remember what he had to do that afternoon, and he came up lacking. Usually, on a day off like this, he'd just watch some TV, read, maybe take a walk until it was time for the gym. But right now he felt like he couldn't stomach any of that.

It would be hours before Sherry got home, but all at once Jake needed to hear her voice. He had to scrutinize the way she spoke, the expression on her face, for some reassurance that he was not a burden to her, and that she was not keeping him around out of pity.

Jake snatched up his phone and dialed her number. The phone rang and rang, until her voicemail picked up and Jake ended the call.

He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, clutching the phone in his numb hand until it buzzed with an incoming text from Sherry.

_In a meeting :P_, the message read. _Talk tonight._

Jake read it over three times in rapid succession, as if he had suddenly lost the ability to comprehend the words.

He was embarrassed that he had called her like that, and he was glad that she had not answered. He wouldn't have known what to say to her. It was shameful, he thought, that he had come this far, saved the world, stared down his death, punched his way out of a hundred tight spots, only to end up calling his girlfriend at work in the middle of the afternoon because he was having a mental shitfit about growing up poor.

That was all in the past. Just like his father was in the past, hired gun work was in the past, and goddamn BOWs were all in the past. There were more things in his past then there were in his future, and that was the way he wanted it.

Jake put his phone away and went back in the other room and turned on the TV. The condo suddenly seemed too quiet. He tried a bunch of different channels, but nothing seemed to fill the space. It was all static, meaningless noise.

He had to talk to someone, just to get his head straight, but he had no idea who he could get to listen. Jake fished out his phone and started scrolling through the contacts, hoping that inspiration would strike. Even after nearly six months in America, he only had about ten numbers saved and two of them were pizza delivery. He'd about dismissed the idea of finding a sympathetic ear as hopeless when he spotted Leon Kennedy's name.

Jake had gotten to know Leon pretty well through Sherry. Though he didn't think they'd ever be really close or anything, he had to admit that Leon was a pretty good guy all around. He had a way of making you like him from the first meeting, a quality which Jake almost never trusted in a man. Leon was all right in his book, though.

He hesitated before he called. Though he was sure Leon would be up for talking, Jake had never initiated contact with him before. He never minded when Sherry had him over for dinner, or when she talked him into coming by to help them move a couch or something, but Jake didn't really consider him a friend. He had never even considered him someone that he might one day be able to be friends with.

But another six hours cooped up in the silent condo with nothing but his thoughts was more than he could take. Jake stabbed his thumb resolutely onto the phone, and then he lifted it and listened to it trill in his ear.

Leon picked up on the forth ring.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Hey. It's Jake." Then, just in case Leon was swamped with calls from Jakes that day, he added, "Jake Muller."

"Sure," Leon said. He cleared his throat as if it were dry. "What's up?"

"I didn't catch you at a bad time, did I?"

"No. I just have a headache. Kind of got a slow start this morning."

"Me too," Jake said. He paused, mulling things over, but Leon didn't jump in and ask him what he wanted, why he was calling out of nowhere. He just sat there patiently on the other end of the line, letting Jake work his way up to being ready to talk.

"I've had a lot on my mind," Jake began carefully, testing it out.

"Yeah?" Leon said. "You want to tell me about it?"

"It's not a big deal," Jake said.

"Then why did you call me?" There was a hint of dry amusement in Leon's voice. Jake knew he wasn't laughing at him, but he was laughing all the same.

"Sherry wanted me to invite you over for dinner on Sunday. That okay?"

"That's fine," Leon replied. "I'll be there."

He said it right away, without that momentary pause that suggested he was checking to make sure it didn't conflict with something else he had going on. Jake hadn't realized it before, but Leon never really seemed to do much that didn't involve him and Sherry. It seemed weird that a guy like that wasn't more popular, but it also made him feel a little better. Jake may have been a bored and friendless loser here in the Land of Opportunity, but at least he didn't have to be one alone.

"Sherry's going to be happy to hear that," Jake said. "Come by around seven."

"Sure," Leon said, and then, before Jake could hang up, he added, "Hope your day gets better."

"Yours too."

"I think I'll lay down for a bit. Try to wait out this damn hangover."

"I thought you said you had a headache," Jake said.

"I do. I have a headache because I'm hungover. See you Sunday, Jake."

He hung up and Jake was left holding the silent phone in his hand. Leon had given him the chance to get it all out, to tell him everything, and Jake had dropped the ball. He had realized that there was no way to talk about money, about Sherry, about any one thing without talking about everything. He wasn't ready for that. Those past traumas had long since healed, and he wasn't about to go around rebreaking old bones just because they hadn't set exactly right.

That wasn't the only reason he had clammed up at the moment of truth, though. Jake did not want to admit it, not even to himself, but it had been at that moment that he had seen his father's face. Wesker would never have gone whining to someone like Leon just because he felt lonely, or bewildered, or overwhelmed.

Hell, Wesker probably had all kinds of weird Objectivist notions about how loneliness was a weakness of character and bewilderment the mark of an inefficient mind, or whatever else they taught you at college. That wasn't why he hadn't been able to say anything. It had been when he imagined his father laughing at him, when he imagined him being disappointed, that was when he had pulled away as if he had been stung.

His father had done this to him. Made him proud about money when he didn't have the slightest idea what it was like to be poor. Wesker may have been lean and hungry looking, but that didn't mean he knew what it was like to starve. He'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and then he'd made a second one to nestle right next to the first.

Even now, there was probably more money in his name stashed in Swiss banks than Jake would ever see in his life. You could do worse than to get your hands on those account numbers, Jake thought. It wasn't as if Wesker needed the money where he was now.

* * *

"He looks the same," said a voice in the darkness. All had been darkness since he awoke, and silence until that voice pierced through them both, a black arrow arching across a black sky. He felt no relief at the presence of another person in that shadowy and noiseless place, only annoyance at having had his peace disturbed.

"Check the EEG," said someone else. The first speaker had been a man, the second a woman. These were indisputable facts, and he clung to them. He repeated the words over to himself: _one man, one woman_. It wasn't much now, butthere was always power in truths judiciously combined. "He's moved out of REM sleep. He's conscious."

"Do you think he knows we're here?"

"Look at him," the woman said. "He doesn't know shit."

"He looks like a burned grilled cheese."

"You have a way with words, darling." He thought that the woman was closer now, but he couldn't say for sure. He heard everything, felt everything, thought everything as if through a layer of cotton gauze.

"The virus is still kicking away, though. The nightshift has been dosing him with enough antiretroviral drugs to eradicate AIDS in West Africa, but he's already regenerating lost tissue."

"What if he comes back as a different person?" the man said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean, there's not much of what was originally there to regenerate. What if he comes back looking different, with different brain chemistry and everything?"

"Are you asking me what happens if he's an innocent man?" the woman said dryly.

The man gave a cynical laugh. It was an rough and ugly sound, but he knew that it was how he sounded when he laughed. How he had sounded.

"Yeah," the man said. "What if he comes back an innocent little infant?"

"Then we'll include it in the notes section of our report. I doubt it will ever get that far, though. We'll be lucky if we get a slice of living, undamaged tissue from this."

He felt an abrupt biting pain near his shoulder and he pulled away from it instinctively. His body strained, and he felt the winding and unwinding of muscles. His tendons pulled uselessly, broken belts inside a ruined machine, and he knew he had not moved.

And that agony in his shoulder dove deeper, deeper, until he thought he had found the very depths of it and then realized he had only just scratched the surface.

A cry came up from somewhere inside of him, some uncharted place that was not on the map he kept of himself. Much to his relief, no sound came out. He could feel loose chords vibrating inside his throat, moving futilely, no longer anchored to muscle.

"The heart monitor is all over the place," the man said. "I guess that hurt."

"He doesn't know when to quit. He's like a slab of meat hooked up to a car battery. Look, when you cut away the necrotized flesh, there's new skin underneath."

"Smooth as a baby's ass."

"We should get some pictures of this," the woman said. "I want to check the progress every day. Try not to announce it to the whole world, though."

"You mean I can't take some pictures with it for Grindr?"

"Babe, you could put the lost Arc of the Covenant on your Grindr profile and you still wouldn't fool anyone into looking at it."

"I'll have you know, I've seen more pictures of flesh and blood assholes since I got on Grindr than you've seen metaphorical assholes since you started working here."

He felt the blade again, probing around the edges of the wound that the woman had opened up in his shoulder. It sent little aftershocks of pain though him. He knew that he was not healing like he should.

"If we play our cards right," she said thoughtfully, "we can leverage this into a promotion out of this place."

"Or we can piss off the wrong people and end up in a world of shit."

"You might piss them off," the woman said. "I'm too charming for that."

"And you're pretty good at this science thing. I'm surprised." The man paused. "Not surprised because you're a girl. But surprised."

"I went to biology camp in middle school. We did dissections. Science is all about dissembling, you know. Taking things apart, breaking them down, asking 'why' until all previous assumptions dissolve and blow away like the fluff on the head of dandelion."

"That's good. I wouldn't mind taking him apart," the man said. "Hey, do you think his dick is still there?"

"Burned to a crisp," the woman said with a sigh. "I already checked."

"Of course you did. I hope that regenerates."

"Of course you do," she replied. "You know, I'm glad we're working together again. You're not as hopeless as you look. We always have fun. This experiment is going to be really rewarding, in a lot of ways."

The experiment, he realized. That was him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Funeral Games - Chapter 4**

Sherry got home late that evening. Jake had whipped up a pretty good eggplant parmesan from a recipe he'd gotten watching the food channel, but by the time Sherry walked through the door at a quarter to nine, it had gotten cold sitting on top of the stove and the red sauce had congealed into slime.

Jake heard her take off her boots at the door, stumbling a few times when she had to stand on one foot to pull down the zippers. She came into the kitchen looking pale, with dark circles under her eyes that Jake swore had not been there the last time her. There was a run in one of the legs of her stockings.

He'd been all set to be annoyed that she hadn't called, but when he saw her, Jake paused. "Long day, babe?"

"Longest day ever," Sherry said. She spotted the eggplant parmesan and all but threw herself at it.

Jake sat with her while she ate ravenously, but she didn't have much to say. After she had finished the eggplant, and the rest of the garlic bread Jake had made to go with it, and an extra grilled cheese that he made for her because she was still hungry, she sat back in her chair and laughed a little.

"I'm so embarrassed that you just saw me eat all that."

"It's okay," Jake said. "I guess it means you trust me. Next thing you know, you'll be leaving the door open while you pee and farting in front of me."

"Don't be silly. I've never farted in my life."

Jake laughed. "Why don't I clean this stuff up?"

"But you already did all the cooking…"

"And you had the longest day ever, right? I'll clean up, you take a shower, and we'll rendezvous on the couch in 20 so I can make sympathetic noises while you tell me all about it."

"You're the best," Sherry said, and when she kissed him before she ran out of the kitchen she made sure to make it count.

Jake sat at the table and sipped a glass of wine. He heard the shower come on and listened to it hum through the walls. He'd been all ready to talk about his feelings and all that other relationship shit, just like a good little boyfriend, but it seemed like Sherry didn't really feel up for it. Maybe when you stayed home all day like he did, you didn't get to have real problems.

He got up and washed the dishes in the sink, then he loaded up the dishwasher and set the timer so it wouldn't start until Sherry was out of the shower. He poured himself another glass of wine, and headed into the living room to wait. Sherry came out and joined him a little while later. She was dressed in her pajamas, wrapped up in a thick belted cardigan sweater. Her hair was in damp curls around her face. She'd always liked to let it air dry.

"You didn't even turn on the TV," she said as she flopped down next to him.

"I was waiting for you. I thought you wanted to talk."

"I just have a lot of stuff going on at work," Sherry said, cuddling up so her head was on his shoulder. She seemed on the verge of falling asleep again.

"You can tell me about work, you know."

"Jake…" Sherry sighed, looking up at him. "I really can't. A lot of it is confidential."

"It's not like I'm going to sell your secrets to the Russians or something."

"I know. But I don't feel right talking about it. I'm working on a big project right now, but I can't tell you the details. I'm sorry."

"Sure," Jake said. "I understand. I won't bring it up again."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I was thinking, why don't we have Leon over on Sunday for dinner?"

"Sunday…" Sherry echoed vaguely, as if she could not remember what the word meant. "Sure, I think that would be nice. Are you starting to like Leon, Jake?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Leon's a solid bro."

"He likes you."

"He likes everybody."

"So?"

"So, I'm not special." He bent his head and kissed her, and then he switched on the TV. Some blond detectives out on the other coast were grilling a murder suspect in suits they couldn't possibly afford on a cop's salary. I made Jake think about those little red numbers in the budget again.

When the commercial came on, he turned down the volume and said, "I'm thinking about canceling my gym membership."

"Really?" Sherry said, startled. "But you always talk about how much you like it…"

"It's not really that great."

"Last week you told me it was the one thing you look forward to every day."

"But we can't afford it," Jake said. His mouth felt dry as he spoke, but he thought he got the words off all right. "I can just start running around the neighborhood or something."

Sherry leaned back to look him in the face. She was scowling, and it made a little V appear between her pale eyebrows. "What makes you think we can't afford it?"

"I had a look at the budget today." This time, there was a little tremor in his voice. Jake heard it, and he wondered if Sherry had. "It's not a big deal or anything…"

"Oh, Jake," Sherry sighed. "Those are old numbers. I haven't updated them since you moved in. We're not about to get evicted or anything, I promise."

"Still," Jake said. "176 dollars is a lot of money."

"I didn't think you'd memorize the exact amount…" Sherry frowned.

"I could go get a job. There's got to be something I can do to pull my weight around here."

Sherry surprised him by planting a kiss on his mouth. "Jake, you're already the best thing that's ever happened around here. You don't have to do anything except keep being wonderful."

Jake felt his cheeks grow hot, and he realized he was blushing. "I guess that settles that," he muttered, embarrassed.

"You're right. It's all settled now." Sherry relaxed beside him, resting her head on his shoulder. The commercials were already over, and the show with the cops was back on. Jake turned the volume back up.

After a few minutes, Sherry looked up at him. "I think the brother-in-law did it."

"Yeah," Jake said. "I figured that."

"Guess you know everything, huh?"

"Guess I do."

"Do you know what I'm thinking right now?" Sherry said, and before Jake could answer, he felt the small and insistent pressure of her hand on his thigh, edging up until her hand was cupped around the bulge in the crotch of his pajama pants.

"I'm starting to get an idea," Jake said. He gave her a squeeze with the arm he had around her waist. "How about another hint?"

"It's not Twenty Questions, Jake."

"It is if all the answers are yes." Her grip on him shifted, and his cock hopped to attention in her hand, zero to sixty in about a millisecond.

"Why Miss Birkin, I'm starting to think you like me."

She slipped her hand back into his pajamas, exploring his erection with the pads of her fingers. "Not as much as your little friend here likes me."

Jake decided he'd had about all of that he could handle. He tightened his grip on Sherry's waist and stood up abruptly, dragging her along and slinging her over his shoulder.

"Jake!" she squeaked, kicking her legs awkwardly below where he was gripping her across the thighs. "This is an illegal move!"

"You want me to put you down…?"

"No!" She brought her palm down hard on his ass. "Put me down in the bedroom."

Jake started down the hall, and she slapped him again. "Faster!"

"Ow, babe, that actually kind of hurts…"

They made it back to the bedroom, and Jake unshouldered her, setting her down on the edge of the bed. Sherry shook her messy hair back and looked up at him. Her cardigan had come unbelted and fallen away from her shoulders, and Jake's erection didn't seem like it was going away any time soon.

He leaned forward, over her, and she bent one leg up between them, setting her toes against his chest and stopping him in his tracks.

"Wait," she said. "I want to fool around, but only on one condition."

"That you get to be on top?"

"Nice try," Sherry said. "But actually, I don't want to hear even one more word about money, or work, or the budget."

"Doesn't give us much to discuss, does it?"

"We should try to stick to more intellectual topics."

"You mean like food trucks? Because there's this amazing one that usually parks downtown by the library that has bahn mi…"

Sherry laughed. "Talking is overrated. Just get over here already."

"Yes, ma'am," Jake said. He leaned over her, and she kneeled up to meet him in a kiss. Her fists clutched in the front of his tee-shirt, drawing him close. But when he looped an arm around her waist, he felt that old familiar tension, muscles clenching beneath the palm of his hand.

For the record, Sherry had never actually pulled away from him, and she had never given him any indication – save that winding up as if in preparation of flight – that she didn't want to be touched. Still, tonight, Jake paused.

"Babe, you're sure you want this, right?"

"Why wouldn't I?" She sounded hurt. Jake had known even before it was out that it was going to be the wrong thing to say, but he hadn't anticipated how totally inappropriate it was going to be.

"I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is, I think it would be pretty hot if you, you know, told me what I should do."

"What do you mean? Like, I want you to have intercourse with me?"

Jake laughed. "You could make it sound a little sexier than that."

She pursed her lips and lowered her upper eyelids, making a face that just missed sultry and landed in the neighborhood of drunk. "I want you to have intercourse with me," she purred.

"Try not calling it intercourse?"

"What about coitus?"

"You know what," Jake said. "Let's work it out later."

Sherry squeaked as he toppled her back on the bed, and as he crawled over her he felt her body arch up against his. "Fornication?" she said.

"Gross."

"Congress? Dalliance?"

"That last one's not bad," Jake said.

"You're really sweet, Jake," she replied. He felt her tugging at the hem of his shirt and he slipped it off for her. She drew the tip of one finger down his chest, and he wound up in anticipation, expecting the bite of her fingernail cutting into his skin. Instead, he felt only the soft pad that crowned her finger. She had, he realized, bitten the nail down to the quick without him ever realizing it.

"What's wrong?" Sherry murmured.

"Nothing," Jake said. His face felt hot, as if he had been caught doing something wrong.

"Really?" She curled her hand around the bulge in the front of his pajama pants, making his stomach turn over weightlessly. "Then this isn't a problem?"

"That's a big problem, babe."

The corners of Sherry's eyes creased with amusement, a smile that did not appear on her lips. "Are you sure it's all the big?"

"Huge."

"We'll just have to see about that." She set her palm in the center of his chest and toppled him onto his back. Swinging one leg over, she straddled his hips. He could feel how wet she was, even through two layers of clothes.

She pulled her shirt off over her head, and Jake's hands settled on her hips automatically, not knowing, even as he moved, that he was going to do it. He felt her shiver, but it was different this time, not a shudder of anxiety but rather a tremor in response to the calluses that webbed Jake's fingers.

Once she had told him that she liked that he was still a little bit rough. He hadn't told her that it was only the constant chafing of the world that had made him that way.

* * *

Eventually, he got healthy enough to feel sick, and he knew that he was quite unwell indeed. His head throbbed like it had been cleaved in two, a big black fissure looming in the darkness in which he was physically and mentally suspended. His stomach was clenched and knotted like a fist, and when he tried to move his limbs the slightest effort made his heart race and his throat constrict. He thought he had lost consciousness a few times since that first definite awakening, but he couldn't be sure. He no longer knew when he was conscious and thinking and when he was asleep and dreaming.

But he wasn't sick, he thought. This was no illness. He was hurt. He was hurt very badly, far beyond what a body ought to have been able to endure.

He remembered the fire, remembered burning. For a brief, irrational moment he thought that he was there even now. Burning beneath the earth, somehow still alive, dying forever.

The process of dying didn't frighten him. It was a simple chemical formula, the transference of matter, a procedure by which nothing was gained or lost. But this limbo, this uncertainty, scared him very badly. He tried to fight against it, to claw his way free, but he ran up against a wall of agony that slapped him back down into oblivion.

A cool hand came out of the darkness and stroked his brow, and he felt a sharp and unfamiliar pain in the ruined sockets where his eyes had been. That was how he knew that he was still dreaming. If he had been awake, he never would have come so close to tears.

When he had been six years old, he had come down with a fever. He remembered a dark room with a heavy shade drawn across the window. A little ribbon of sunlight had come in around the edge of the curtain, and as he had watched it crawl across the wall.

He was burning, and he would never do anything else. He had always been in the fire.

Beneath his cheek, he recalled now, the pillow had been damp with sweat. Sometimes he felt impersonal hands on him. Moving him, changing the sheets, placing an IV in one of his small veins. Then one day the fever had broken, and he was all alone. Before, there had been other children here; now, they were gone. It never occurred to him to ask to where they had departed. He understood that they were dead and that he had lived. There was no point getting sentimental about it. The fire had not gone out, but he had learned to beat it back with his reason, put it out of sight.

"Look at this," the woman said. Her voice brought him out of unconsciousness, worrying him back into the dark and motionless waking world. He loathed her for it, but he clung to her voice all the same. It was the only way to be sure he was really here.

Her fingers moved over his face, prying open the flaps of skin that had fused over his desiccated eye sockets. For a moment, the shadows that covered him broke and he could see light, dull gray as if filtered through a cataract. Then a shade passed in front of him and the light was gone, as if it had been no more than optical illusion cobbled into place by a damaged and panicked mind.

"That white thing in there is the optical nerve. It's starting to regenerate."

He heard the man's voice now. "Thanks, Jessica. I was just thinking to myself how much I wanted to see the grossest thing ever."

"You're the one with red chest hair. You don't get a say in what's gross."

The woman's thumb stroked a slow, thoughtful circle around the inner ridge of his eye socket. It was an awful, intimate sensation, and it reminded him of Excella. He detested most things about her. Her hands, her voice, the way she acted as if the two of them were not just biding time until it was advantageous to turn on each other.

He'd never asked her to touch him, but sometimes she had. He remembered her fingers combing through his hair, pressing his temples, digging into the backs of his shoulders. It had all been so strange, so unwelcome, that it had taken him a long time to realize that, in her own frosty way, she was trying to make him feel good.

Maybe she would come for him soon… No, no, she was dead. He knew that. It wasn't like him to lose track of something important like that.

"His fingers are twitching," the man announced.

"He doesn't have fingers."

"His stubs are twitching."

The hand on his brow withdrew. For an instant, he saw gray light, light so faint and diffuse that it could hardly be called light at all. Then darkness descended once more.

"They are twitching," the woman said. Her name was Jessica. That's what the other had called her. He'd do well to remember that.

"What do you make of it?" the man said.

"It's gross."

"Astounding powers of observation."

"Are you getting scared, Raymond darling?"

"Scared of a guy like that getting loose in the world again? Is this a trick question?"

"Relax," Jessica said. "Nothing's going to happen. There's nothing he can do like this, and if he tries, I'm here to show him who's boss."


	5. Chapter 5

**Funeral Games - Chapter 5**

The next day, Jake decided to do two workouts to make up for the one he had missed. He was pleased to have Sherry's blessing to continue his gym membership, though he still felt a lingering shadow of guilt clinging to him. He wasn't sure if it was because he had brought up money in the first place, or because he had hardly put up a fight at all when Sherry had said there was no problem. He had accepted it with barely a whimper.

About half way through his second turn in the weightroom, the battery in Jake's iPod died. He'd been listening to one of those pop culture podcasts, trying to catch up on everything he'd missed growing up in the backwater of Eastern Europe. He'd never admitted it to Sherry, but he was genuinely afraid of talking with Americans his age, scared that he'd miss some reference to _Buffy the Vampire Killer_ or whatever and die some kind of agonizing social death.

When the little device clicked off mid-sentence, Jake was so startled he actually jumped a little. There were about five or six other guys down in the weightroom, puffing and clanking the barbells around. He barely heard them, though. Without the steady flow of happy chatter streaming through his earphones, it seemed quiet.

Jake had been following the same workout for so long that he could do it on muscle memory alone. If he didn't have something to distract him, then he wouldn't have to think at all. He could just let his mind wander. When that happened, he almost never liked where he ended up.

His palms were slick with sweat, and they slid on the bars when he tried to lift a pair of barbells. He dried his hands on his basketball shorts and tried again.

At some point along the line, Jake thought, his father had done this too. That skinny kid Jake had once seen in a photograph would, only a few years later, go on to lead the STARS unit. He hadn't gotten there without some serious training. It would have been tough on someone like him. He was used to things coming easily, and getting into fighting shape certainly wouldn't have been a breeze. Wesker had done it, though. Not because he liked working out, not because he wanted to look better, not because it gave him confidence. Only because he had known how strong he would need to be to face what was to come.

Of course, it would have been easier with a personal trainer and a private gym at his disposal. Wesker could have afforded all that. It seemed like it all came back to money with him, which was just another reason for Jake to hate him. By all accounts, Wesker had more cash than he ever could have spent. He could have saved them both back in Edonia. He could have paid his mother's medical bills, not out of any lingering affection for her but simply on a whim.

He could have done everything for them, but he had not.

The worst part about it was that all that money was probably sitting in some offshore account somewhere, untouched since Wesker's death. Jake was his only family, and at the end it seemed like Wesker had been pretty short on friends, too.

Maybe he'd left it all to charity, Jake thought bitterly; the Metropolitan Opera or the Humane Society.

If he could only get his hands on a tiny fraction of Wesker's fortune, he'd really put it to good use. He'd be able to start pulling his weight financially. He could help pay off the car, and maybe he'd even be able to do something nice for Sherry. She never really wore a lot of jewelry, but maybe she would if he could find the right pieces for her.

It would never happen, though. He had no claim to that money and he was never going to see a damn cent of it. If he walked into some lawyer's office claiming to be Wesker's bastard kid and demanding eighteen years' worth of back child support, birthday gifts, and money for school books, they'd just laugh him right back out again.

It was best to just put it all out of his mind.

Jake couldn't do it, though. He may not have had any claim to that money, but neither did anyone else. And just maybe that meant he was actually starting on equal footing for once in his life.

* * *

When Jake got home, he realized there was a pile of laundry to get done, and he all but threw himself on it, grateful for the distraction. But after the clothes were sorted and the first load was spinning cheerfully inside the machine, he hesitated.

He flipped on the TV and tried to watch the afternoon news, but he couldn't focus. He was used to getting his news online, but he didn't dare pick up the computer now; he was afraid of where a few idle keystrokes might take him. Restless, he went into the kitchen and started dinner. He cut up some potatoes and carrots and put them in the slow cooker with a roast. It was the only thing he knew how to make that needed to be started so early in the afternoon.

For a while, he just watched the food cook, the little bubbles of broth forming around the rim of the slow cooker. All at once, his head snapped up as if he had come out of a trance.

To hell with it, he thought. He'd just do a little research, just satisfy his curiosity. It wasn't as if he had anyone to answer to here.

He grabbed his laptop and sat down at the kitchen table. Feeling bold, almost defiant, he pulled up a search engine and typed in "inheritance law". A bunch of results came back. Skimming through them, Jake gathered that a lot of the specifics depended on what state the dead person had lived in.

Here, Jake hesitated. He knew vaguely that Wesker had died overseas, but he didn't see any reason why he wouldn't have still been a United States citizen. Still, he had no idea what state his father had called home. Raccoon City was in Colorado, so that seemed like as good a guess as anything, but he couldn't say for sure.

The realization made him feel strange and ashamed. Over the past few weeks he'd begun to get the impression that he was developing some kind of connection with his father, like he was beginning to understand him. Now he remembered that he had never really known him at all.

Disgusted, Jake slammed the laptop closed. He'd done a lot of shit for money in his time. There weren't too many things he hadn't been willing to dirty his hands with if the price was right. This didn't sit well with him, though.

Money was one thing. Letting your personal feelings enter into it was very much another.

Jake didn't want to look up anything else. He'd leave Wesker's money where it was. Let him take it to hell with him for all Jake cared.

It would be better that way.

* * *

On Sunday, Leon came over. Jake had all but forgotten about their dinner date, but fortunately Sherry didn't let it slip his mind entirely. She got out the good dishes, and even pulled a white tablecloth that Jake didn't even know they'd owned out of some obscure cupboard.

It was a lot of trouble to go to for fried chicken and some homemade macaroni and cheese, but Jake was careful not to mention that. Sherry seemed to be in a genuinely good mood for once, humming to herself as she bustled around the house getting everything just right.

She has a crush on Leon, Jake realized abruptly. Or at least she'd had one at some point along the line. Jake surprised himself by not really minding, at least not enough to feel a real pang of jealousy.

Hell, from what Jake knew of their past together, he'd be more suspicious if Sherry didn't have a little bit of a thing for him.

Leon showed up right on time, and when Jake came to the door to let him in, he noticed the faint smell of alcohol around him. He wasn't reeking of it or anything, and he sure wasn't acting drunk, but Jake realized Leon had already had a few beers before he came over.

It didn't strike Jake as all that strange. In the army, he'd known plenty of guys who'd turned to drinking as a kind of balm to help soothe away the things they'd seen and done. Jake had never thought it was shameful, or even all that mystifying. It was just something other people did.

Still, he didn't like thinking of Leon as one of those other people. Because if he hadn't made it through everything unscarred, then what hope could there possibly be for the rest of them?

After what seemed like about a year, Sherry finally came barreling out of the kitchen, kicking up enough noise to drown out that unanswerable question, scattering it from the corners and airing out the last of its presence in the room.

She flung her arms around Leon's neck. "Where have you been hiding? I feel like I never see you anymore!"

"Cashing in some well-earned vacation days," Leon said, allowing himself to be led inside. Jake trailed behind them, a wisp of shadow in their wake. "I drove up to Atlantic City."

"Atlantic City is for old people," Sherry said, wrinkling her nose.

"Then it suits me fine. I feel like I've lived about a thousand years already."

"Don't go drying up into wrinkled old husk before you taste Jake's chicken," Sherry said. She was still fussing over Leon, getting him settled at the table. "He's turned into a pretty good cook. I still had to make dessert, though. He doesn't like to bake."

"There are too many little spoons and cups and things," Jake said, taking his seat. "Too much chemistry."

Sherry poured Leon a glass of wine, and Jake found himself watching carefully to see how Leon would react to the alcohol. He glanced at it, but it didn't make him get weird or anything. Jake couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

"Jake's like me," Leon said. "A shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy."

"How'd all that shooting from the hip work out for you in Atlantic City?" Sherry called from the kitchen. She had the plates in there and she was dishing up dinner for them.

"I lost more than I'd care to admit at blackjack, but then I hit the jackpot on one of the slot machines. I rode the bus back with a giant sack full of nickels that I won."

"Nickle slots?" Sherry said, edging back into the dining room with the plates balanced on her arms. "You really are old, Leon."

"I'm all but retired now," Leon replied. "It's time I started playing the part. This smells great, Jake."

Sherry seemed to have brightened up some. There was more color in her cheeks than Jake could remember seeing there in a while. Over dinner, she talked a lot about work, but she didn't actually say anything specific about the projects she was assigned to. Maybe they really were Top Secret, Jake thought. He'd had always assumed that was just her way of saying she didn't want to discuss them with him.

After they had finished eating, Sherry, who had never left a dirty plate in the sink overnight, stayed behind to load the dishwasher. Jake and Leon stepped out on the tiny balcony and drank a couple of beers in the cool night air.

They were silent for a while. It didn't even occur to Jake that they were supposed to be making conversation until Leon said, "The house looks really great, you know."

"Thanks," Jake said. "I try to take good care of it."

"Do you have enough to keep you busy? I mean, do you get bored without anything to do during the day?"

Jake shrugged. "Do you?"

"I thought I would when I first decided to leave the full time job and go on retainer," Leon said. "But I'm actually doing okay."

Jake was briefly annoyed with him. He hadn't expected him to answer honestly.

"I've been catching up on a lot of reading," Leon said. "And I've picked up my guitar again for the first time since high school. I think I might take a class, too. French or something. I'd like to learn French. What about you?'

"I've got the gym," Jake said. "I've got a lot of things that keep me busy."

"Any hobbies?" Leon said.

Jake glanced over at him. Leon was turned toward him slightly, and when he watched him like that Jake knew that he couldn't tell him anything. All at once, Leon looked away, out over the bright, regular lights of the city. He took a long swallow of beer.

Inside, Jake could hear the water running in the kitchen. Sherry would still be a few minutes at least, and with the sink on, she wouldn't hear what he said.

"I looked up some stuff about my dad this week," Jake said quietly.

"Stuff?" Leon echoed.

"Money stuff," Jake said. "He owes me, I figure. It's the least he can do."

"Did you find anything?" Leon asked.

"Nothing." Jake sighed. "It's not like I had a whole lot to go on. Just a name, really. Sometimes I wonder if he really was my father, or if all this is just some joke everyone is playing on me."

"If it's a joke, it's not a very funny one," Leon said. "You probably aren't asking for advice, are you?"

"Not really," Jake said. "I just thought I might get lucky for once, you know?"

"You think you're not lucky?"

"I guess I'm doing pretty well for myself," Jake said. "I've got Sherry, and we've got this place together. I've got more peace and quiet than I know what to do with."

"So what's the problem?"

"It bothers me more than I thought. That someone like Wesker could die with all those secrets, without leaving anyone behind who knows anything about him. Even if it's just so they could tell me what an asshole he was all the time, I'd like to talk to someone who knew him."

"Chris knew him. Chris Redfield."

Jake laughed, shaking his head. "I can't ask him. He'd just take it the wrong way. He doesn't like me much as it is."

"I'm not exactly his favorite person these days either."

Jake glanced at him briefly. Inside, he heard the sink shut off, which meant he only had a minute left before Sherry came out to join them.

"Leon, did you ever meet him?"

"Wesker?" Leon shook his head. "Not once. But I was in Raccoon City, and I don't blame him for what happened there. I'm not trying to say that I think he's misunderstood or innocent or anything, but one person couldn't have made all that happen on his own. Part of me wants to believe that he just got swept up in things, like all the rest of us did. I don't like to think that there are evil people in the world."

"If he didn't do it, then who did?"

"A company," Leon said with a shrug. "An idea, a philosophy. Something huge and inhuman that would benefit from having one insignificant human being to pin all its crimes on."

"It wasn't any corporate philosophy that could have paid my mom's doctor bills and didn't."

"You sure about that?" Leon said.

Jake glanced over at him sharply. He knew what Leon was getting at, but it was the last thing he needed or wanted to hear from him. Leon, the Boy Scout. As American as apple pie. It didn't mean much coming from him.

Before Jake had a chance to answer, Sherry came out of the other room. She had a bottle of beer in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was sneaking a quick peek at her work email before she joined them.

"What are you boys talking about?"

Jake didn't answer. He couldn't tell her the truth, and he couldn't think of a single thing to say to change the subject. Fortunately, Leon was there to cover for him.

"I'm trying to convince Jake to start learning French with me?"

"Really?" Sherry smiled. "Jake, are you going to do it?"

"I don't know. I'm not really good with languages. Besides, French isn't very practical."

"It is when you're being romantic."

"I'm already romantic," Jake said. "I let you eat the olives out of my salad, and I paint your toenails for you, remember?"

"And those things would be even better if you could speak French while you do them." All at once, her expression softened into something fond and kind. It took Jake totally by surprise.

"Besides," she said. "I like the idea of you and Leon spending time together. My two favorite boys ought to keep an eye on each other when I'm not around."


End file.
